| We remain just 17 days away from the 2024 presidential election, whose result will decide much more than just our foreign policy in the Middle East. Both candidates, Joan Walsh reminded us, have recently been on Fox News, where the daytime TV crowd saw Trump fumble answers about tax cuts and abortion. Harris may not have been perfect, but even former Republicans lauded her performance, especially her toughness in facing down a hostile Bret Baier. With every battleground state essentially a toss-up at this point, Harris’s smart, energetic performance could make a difference. Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Pentagon press secretary under Trump, posted on X: “It matters around the edges in a tight race.” And this race couldn’t be tighter.
Meanwhile, more than a year into Israel’s war on Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon, the destruction and despair have not eased. Terrifying images and videos of a fire in the displaced Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza dominated the week’s news feed. Patients burned alive while their peers, nurses, and doctors tried to save them. “The air itself seemed to scream,” Mohammed Mhawish wrote from Cairo after watching the playback. “The ground burned with the heat of destruction.”
Despite the horrors, Gazans continue to uphold sumud, or “the unbreakable refusal to submit to subjugation,” as Ahmad Ibsais defines it. In a rare moment of light amid the darkness, Ibsais explains how Gazans have “devised makeshift solutions to daily life—like a hand-washing machine made from a bicycle, a clay oven made from mud and straw to bake bread, and generators assembled from whatever machine parts they can find.” It is hard to imagine being creative in a moment like this one, and yet the people of Gaza have displayed an impressive, “stubborn perseverance under siege.”
–Alana Pockros
Engagement Editor, The Nation |
